As attorney general of Oklahoma, Pruitt has led the legal fight
against many of the EPA’s signature regulations during the Obama
administration, including the Clean Power Plan, the Waters of the
United States rule and standards on toxic and interstate air
pollution.

Given Pruitt’s hostility to EPA policy and President-elect
Trump’s stated positions on climate change, energy and regulation in general, the direction of
federal environmental policy is about to shift abruptly.

During the Obama administration, the EPA has made achieving
environmental justice a key priority. Earlier this fall, the
agency released its long-term strategy, EJ 2020 Action Agenda, to better deliver on
its historical promises of reducing disparities in
environmental protection.

With the EPA under new leadership, however, the durability of
these reforms are now in doubt.

Particularly vulnerable

In the month since the presidential election, considerable
attention has been given to what environmental policy might look
like in the Trump administration. For good reason, much of the
emphasis has been on climate change, given President-elect Trump’s
own climate denial and the appointment of Myron Ebell, a long-time critic
of the EPA, to direct the agency’s transition team.

The EPA’s portfolio, of course, is much broader than climate
change. With some recent regulatory initiatives, such as the
Clean Power Plan, there are significant limits on what can be easily
undone. However, little can prevent the new administration from
changing or even eliminating discretionary, voluntary EPA
initiatives.

This is why recent environmental justice efforts are at such
risk. During the Obama administration, the EPA has invested
significant time and effort to develop new policies, tools and
strategies to address income- and race-based disparities in
environmental protection. Yet, because nearly all of these
efforts have been pursued without the force of law or regulation,
they can be easily (and quietly) reversed.

Redirected or ignored

REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

There are many ways in which the new leadership at the EPA can
undermine federal environmental justice policies and programs.

First, President Trump could revoke President Clinton’s 1994
executive order on environmental justice. Executive Order 12898 requires federal
agencies to make “achieving environmental justice part of its
mission by identifying and addressing, as appropriate,
disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental
effects of its programs, policies, and activities on minority
populations and low-income populations.”

Short of revocation, the EPA administrator could reinterpret the
executive order to make it virtually meaningless. This occurred
under the leadership of former EPA administrators Christie Todd
Whitman and Stephen Johnson during the George W. Bush
administration, when the EPA essentially redefined environmental
justice to diminish its focus on poor and minority communities.

The consequence of this action was to signal to EPA staff, and
the states that help implement federal programs, that promoting
environmental justice was not an agency priority.

Second, the Trump EPA could set aside the agency’s EJ 2020 Action
Agenda, either formally or simply by ignoring it. The EPA is
under no legal requirement to pursue the items enumerated in this
agenda. Similarly, the new administrator and politically
appointed program heads could instruct staff to set aside
procedures set forth in new policy guidance.

This guidance, developed as part of the EPA’s Plan EJ 2014 program, created procedures to
consider environmental justice routinely throughout agency
decisions, in areas ranging from permitting to rulemaking to
enforcement. But, because these procedures are discretionary,
they can be formally replaced, or just neglected.

What is at stake?

To the extent that the Trump EPA either relaxes the stringency of
current regulations and/or elects not to pursue new protections,
the effects could fall disproportionately on historically
vulnerable communities.

Because major sources of pollution are more likely to be located
in poor and minority communities, efforts to reduce pollution
tend to positively affect people living in these areas. As a
result, recent EPA efforts to tighten air quality standards, for
example, on toxic emissions from oil refineries,
specifically benefit many low-income and minority communities.

The
flow of crude oil is seen in a container while an oilfield worker
works on a drilling rig at an oil well operated by Venezuela's
state oil company PDVSACarlos Garcia
Rawlins/Reuters

If the EPA, most likely with a drastically reduced budget, pulls
back from enforcing existing pollution control programs, this may
create further inequities in environmental burdens. More
“business-friendly” permitting and lax compliance monitoring are
relatively discreet ways to lower the regulatory burden facing
power plants, factories and other major sources of pollution.

Further, most of the day-to-day implementation of major federal
pollution control statutes is managed by state agencies. And
under the leadership of Scott Pruitt, the EPA is likely to look
for opportunities to hand off additional responsibilities to
state governments.

State efforts are supposed to be overseen by EPA’s ten regional
offices. But if these offices do not perform robust oversight,
states are left to administer these programs as they see fit. In
some states, this could exacerbate class- and race-based
disparities in regulatory enforcement, as I have found already to
exist in research with Chris Reenock on the Clean Air Act, and in other research on the
Clean Water Act and Resource Conservation and Recovery
Act.

Any reason for optimism?

Perhaps, these worst-case scenarios will not come to pass. Career
staff could push back against a new leadership team hostile to
its ideals. In some respects, agency personnel responded this way to the anti-regulatory,
budget-minimizing tenure of Ann Gorsuch, the first EPA
administrator appointed by President Reagan.

And, perhaps, President-elect Trump will surprise. A consistent
policy priority of the incoming administration has been
rebuilding the country through new infrastructure. If such an
infrastructure program includes major investments in wastewater
treatment, for example, this may enhance environmental quality
for some poor and minority communities.

Details of this and other priorities have yet to emerge, however.
And, the early signs from the campaign trail and now the
appointment of Scott Pruitt to head the agency portend an EPA
that is likely to deprioritize, if not attempt to dismantle,
important environmental protection measures. For the people
living in already overburdened communities, the potential risks
of this type of retrenchment are real and personal.